I've been in the IT industry since the time of the dinosaurs (ICL anyone?). I've written books about the Internet and networking, consulted for all sorts of companies, and been a contributor and columnist for Network World for 18 years (check out my Backspin and Gearhead columns). I created and co-founded Netratings (now wholly owned by Nielsen) and have CTO'ed for a couple of startups. I live in Ventura, CA. I do not surf.

Apple's "Mountain Lion" Disappoints

On July 26, I installed “Mountain Lion“, Apple‘s latest version of its operating system, OS X. Today, three days later, I am not a happy customer.

Now I know that every major release of any software and particularly of any operating system is bound to have problems. There will always be odd bugs that annoy and frustrate but Apple has a problem: They are supposed to be better than everyone else. Why? Because Apple claims the high ground on design and execution and, in the main they have delivered and, some might argue, over-delivered. Apple has driven the entire PC market in ways that no other vendor has ever managed to do and much of that success has been due to delivering high quality.

So should we cut Apple a little slack? I don’t think so …

Enough scene-setting … why am I not happy? Well, I installed Mountain Lion – which was painless – on my iMac and the first odd things I noticed when it restarted was the screen brightness was at maximum and the Calendar app had been launched. I turned the brightness down, quit Calendar, and launched Chrome only to find that it had lost all of the “pinned” tabs. I reconfigured Chrome and left the room for a cup of tea. When I got back, the screen was back at full brightness, Calendar was running again, and a dialog box was open telling me that the wretched OS had crashed.

In the 72 hours since I installed Mountain Lion the OS has crashed at least half a dozen times. Chrome will not retain its pinned tabs. The brightness setting doesn’t stick after a crash. Calendar always runs at startup.

Yeah, so far (I’ve not had time to try all of the apps I use so other problems may await me) these are all small issues but come on, this is Mountain Lion installed on an iMac built in mid-2010, not some old clunky Mac from the naughties.

I’m hoping for some quick updates from Apple here …

I can’t be the only one with OS X problems … What issues have you seen with Mountain Lion and are you unhappy?

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Obviously there is something very wrong with your installation of Mountain Lion. I have been using the developer previews and the release version since April and have experienced 1…count them…one Mac OS kernel panic (system crash).

Now, if apps are crashing for you, that’s something else and likely not Mountain Lion’s fault. Is the entire Mac crashing to the point that you have to restart?

As for your brightness issues, go to Displays in System Preferences and uncheck “Automatically adjust brightness”.

Yep, according to the log the machine restarts after every 6 or 7 panics. And under Displays on my system there is no “Automatically adjust …” (really!). Curiously the brightness problem has disappeared in the last 48 hours of crashes. FWIW, the last SDR from this morning follows. A couple of people have looked at it but no joy so far. The panic type is either 14 (page fault) as below or 13 (general protection). Let me know at if you come to any conclusion …

Begin with attention to KEXTs for things that are outdated. If VirtualBox is 4.0.12, that’s seriously outdated; https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10267 notes that 4.1.16 was the first to be made compatible with a seeded build of Mountain Lion.

I went to the ‘genius’ bar with this same problem, and Apple pointed the finger straight at Chrome. When I took issue with the fact that Apple’s newest OS doesn’t work with Google Chrome the most popular browser on the planet, the ‘genius’ tried to explain to me why I shouldn’t be using Chrome… completely ignoring the idea that as a developer I want to work with all browsers to ensure I’m covering the largest audience… guess that isn’t possible with a new Mac. Color me disappointed.

I installed Mountain Lion on this 2000 MacBook Pro 17″ on the date of release and haven’t had any problems at all. I installed it on my wife’s MacBook Pro 15″ the following day and that computer hasn’t exhibited any issues either. Your article does detail how you prepared for the installation, there were several “get ready” for Mountain Lion articles on-line from Macworld and other sites. Did you follow any of them, such as preinstall updates, browser extensions, etc.?

As an owner of a 2009 iMac with Intel Core i5 2.66 GHz I can state that I have experienced NO SUCH ISSUES whatsoever. I of course can’t/won’t deny you and some users may be experiencing issues, but given the fact the the vast majority of user feedback is overwhelmingly positive, I can only suspect that the issue lies within software on your particular device and is not endemic to the operating system at all. Happily, for me and most all others the new operating system represents a great and innovative tweak to the lion OS 10. Safari has not crashed once and performs significantly faster than the previous version.